Quotes

It was part of his personal code not to make use of his memory for money. David Ireland, The Glass Canoe

He is troubled by an image of himself, suffers when he is named. Roland Barthes

Although I have already drawn many alphabets, I am only at the first letters, the first fields, the first foothills, the first paths, the first approaches, the first concords, the first gardens. Michel Butor

Cinema of the Blind! Every cinema should be called that. Their flickering images blind people to reality! Franz Kafka

... and he fell more miserably than he on whose fall that mighty clamour was raised, which entered through his ears, and unlocked his eyes, to make way for the striking and beating down of his soul ... The Confessions of St. Augustine

I can see the coral
underneath the water
glowing in my poems
there's mangroves
along the shore &
some typical event
occurs--you laugh
at me asleep in a
glass-bottomed boat
or we invent
a beautiful sequence
of implied emotions
arriving by virtue
of strange location
among flora & fauna
growing vaguer as
I write this down
& you, once vividly
a matter of detail,
take over the whole
picture & disappear. John Forbes, Going North

Walking: That's my job, walking and waiting. Johnny Staccato

His eyes were full of people. LB (after MO)

It was curious that a machine could reproduce the anxiety of the person operating it. Shirley Hazzard, The Transit of Venus

I'm tired of lights that go out at midnight. Hal Porter

In that case, I'll miss the thing by waiting. Franz Kafka

Daydreaming my dry-as-dust thoughts. Leonardo Sciascia, Open Doors

a chunky piece of bread, a day or two old, toasted and thickly smeared all over with vegemite as water-proofing (for a very small donkey to raft on). CC

He is such a hive and swarm of parasites that it is doubtful whether his body is not more theirs than his, and whether he is anything but another kind of ant-heap after all. May not man himself become a sort of parasite upon the machines? Samuel Butler, Erewhon, 1872

... human life was thus image-graced and image-cursed; it could comprehend itself only through images, the images were not to be banished, they had been with us since the herd-beginning ... Hermann Broch, The Death of Virgil

It's a question of the refrain that fixes me in front of the screen. Felix Guattari

The master cord of the man in grey had been touched, and it seemed as if it would never cease vibrating. Herman Melville, The Confidence Man

... the dawn of things, before betrayals and downstream mud. Guy Davenport

Sol LeWitt remarked that the wood from his one-man show (John Daniels Gallery, 1965) should be "used for firewood". Dan Graham

If we worshipped the wood of the image, should we not burn the icon when the representation grew faint? Leontius, Bishop of Neapolis on Cyprus

One Sunday during the summer of 1973 I was ready. Using a number of tricks, I worked myself into a mood of concentrated rage and excited determination. The fight could begin. Arnulf Rainer

... it was written I should be loyal to the nightmare of my choice. Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness.

He had never been a sniveler after the ineffable. Flannery O'Conner, The Enduring Chill

No one, however smart, however well educated, however experienced, is the suppository of all wisdom.ex-Prime Minister Tony Abbott

Let us place the eye under the control of touch. Vladimir Tatlin, The Work Ahead of Us, 1920

Police initially tried to appeal to the protesters to move through a loud speaker. ABC News, 'Melbourne police clash with East West Link protesters', Dec. 17 2013

It is the feet of clay that makes the gold of the image precious. Oscar Wilde, Dorian Gray

To write a poem that has the properties of a diamond: transparency, sparkle, hardness, impenetrability. Ezra Pound

Where images disappear, they must be replaced by images: if not, loss threatens. Ernst Junger

The strangest part of the dream, said Pelletier, was that the water was alive. Roberto Bolano, 2666

Ah, the pirates! the pirates!
The passion for something illegal and savage,
The passion to do absolutely cruel, abominable things
Like an abstract rut gnawing at our fragile bodies,
Our delicate feminine nerves,
Making great mad fevers burn in our empty gazes!
[...]
Let me always gloriously assume the submissive role
In bloody happenings and quartered sensualities! Alvaro de Campos, Maritime Ode

The assistant had left the front shop for an instant, when he heard a crash, and hurrying in he found a plaster bust of Napoleon ... lying shivered into fragments. Arthur Conan Doyle, The Adventure of the Six Napoleons

I followed them with my eyes and saw how high they soared in one breath, till I felt not that they were rising but that I was falling ... Franz Kafka, Children on a Country Road

The optics aren't what they look like. Dean Baquet (N.Y.T. managing editor) in response to Mark Mazzetti's (N.Y.T. national security & intelligence reporter) leaking of a story to the CIA prior to publishing

The closer he came to this deceptive image of the island's shore, the more this image receded; it continued to flee from him, and he knew not what to think of this flight. Francois Fenelon, The Adventures of Telemachus

I want to give, to be given, and solitude in which to unfold my possessions. Virginia Woolf, The Waves

Bell, peering between the helmeted heads of the two men in front of him, blinked suddenly as if struck in the face by a sea wave while swimming. James Jones, The Thin Red Line

The orifice is open to question, if that's what it is. Jello Biafra, Oprah 1986

The silk grey of the contre temps The troubled grey of time The grey the grief. Helene Cixous

He had a white buttocky face with a few moles, and fat curling thumbs that put a cheating spin on the ball. Saul Bellow, Herzog

I shall not seem fanciful in thinking of social man as a veritable somnambulist ... The social, like the hypnotic state, is only a form of dream. Gabriel Tarde

I ascribe my failure in life to the well-known fact that I have not succeeded. J.W. Radner, Chicago 1890

Many times I have waited for her in that yielding room. Mario Vargas Llosa on Emma Bovary

Rufus Dawes did not understand the silence ... His faculties of hearing and thinking (...) seemed to break down. It was as though some prop had been knocked from under him. Marcus Clarke, His Natural Life

Each click would expose the clerk and his store to partial annihilation. Robert Smithson, idea for a horror movie about a camera store to be called 'Invasion of the Camera Robots' (1971)

Time saws me like a coin, and I - I don't suffice, not even for myself. Osip Mandelshtam, The Horseshoe Finder (trans. Paul Celan)

And all you were doing was stealing chickens, nailing things to the wall. Everytime you stopped playing you became a lie. Michael Ondaatje, Coming Through Slaughter

So it is with life, death, and eternity, things that would be quite simple to anyone who had organs vast enough to comprehend them. Stendhal, Scarlet and Black

... coating his words with the grease of his smile. Virgilio Pinera, Rene's Flesh

How we see things determines how we act and even who 'we' are, as the fragile temper of our acts breaks like a bubble from the drowning mouth and into the air, shaping these identities to begin with. John Forbes, Topothesia

Happenstance must be the matter of unceasing and rigorous calculation. Jules Verne quoting E.A.Poe

"I must verify", says the Postmistress, "I cannot charge my client for an uncertainty." Eleanor Clark, The Oysters of Locmariaquer

There was a bubble around things thus captured, a hermetic breathlessness and a pressure that squeezed the perspective flat. John Updike, Conjunction

... she looked a little toneless in here, away from the sundance of poolside light, her face deprived of its unquiet shading ... Don DeLillo, Underworld

Ms. Mekhennet asked her interrogator, "Where are we?" The interrogator answered, "You are nowhere." New York Times, Feb. 4 2011

Like the onset of some cold glaucoma dimming away the world.Cormac McCarthy, The Road

Not built for the ages but rather against the ages.Robert Smithson

DAY, n. A period of 24 hours, mostly misspent.Ambrose Bierce

Easy methods! But are we really sure of swimming in the ocean by putting a box of salt in our bathtub?Maurice Talmeyr

I have a horror of all metiers.Arthur Rimbaud, Mauvais Sang

They believe in themselves, which is almost the same as being good.TV commentator on the Cincinnati Cubs, June 2010

It wasn't a thing of a monstrous order; not a fate rare and distinguished; not a stroke of fortune that overwhelmed and immortalised; it had only the stamp of the common doom.Henry James, The Beast in the Jungle

Perception of an object costs
Precise the Object's loss -
Perception in itself a Gain
Replying to its Price -

The Object Absolute - is nought -
Perception sets it fair
And then upbraids a Perfectness
That situates so far -Emily Dickinson, 1071

I like nativity scenes, I just can't stand the poverty of the shepherds!Luigi Giuliano, Giuliano clan boss, Forcella, Naples

They lived in a suburb arrived at only by secondary roads.said of the Rockefeller murder accused, Melbourne 2009

... each imagegetting less and less attractive,like the beginning of a slanderon the one that went before.John Forbes, Je ne regrette rien

It's not that fast horses are rare, but men who know enough to spot them are few and far between.Han Yu

He had failed to work up a fresh sense of indignation. As his chemistry master used to say, the solution was already saturated. Saturated with indignation.Leonardo Sciascia, Open Doors

If there's no bottom in your eyes they hold more.Hazel Motes in Flannery O'Conner's Wise Blood

Expression diminishes you, impoverishes you, lifts weights off you: expression is a loss of substance, and liberation. It drains you, hence it saves you, it strips you of an encumbering overflow.E. M. Cioran

Such is therefore a look lacking terror, a look that does not learn, but that follows.Jean Louis Schefer

How do you get to the point of a sabbath, that is legitimate and deserved? Wendell Berry

My dad and I share the same shadow. Kim Peek

There's no whining in baseball. Mother to son, Central Park NYC, May 2009

With a single note they muffle a thousand possibilities. Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities

Pay no heed. They'd all have you circling if you paid them heed. John McGahern

Sometimes to refute a single sentence it is necessary to tell a life story. John Berger

He speaks like a flopped somersault and behaves like a big improbability pummeled into human shape. Robert Walser, Jakob von Gunten (on his fellow-pupil Fuchs)

A page of printed prose should bring to it's mimesis something extra, a kind of supernatural as it were, to lend roundness - a fine excess that corresponds with the intricacy and opacity of the real world. John Updike (1932-2009)

I know not what course others may take, but as for me, give me Catatonia or give me Charlie Chaplin. At the moment, a great many of us live in our 51st state, Catatonia ... Since I choose to live outside that state, I wear the Fool's motley. It makes things easier ... Fools of the world unite. You have nothing to lose.
Studs Terkel (1912-2008)

... the blighting power of the 'eye' made nearly everyone artificial.
Clarence John Laughlin

In the Parsee Ahab saw his forethrown shadows, in Ahab the Parsee his abandoned substance.
Herman Melville, Moby Dick

What a blank space I seemed, that everybody overlooked, yet, I was in the way.
Charles Dickens, David Copperfield

Illiterates have to dictate.
Stanislaw Jerzy Lec, 1964

Rennet of memory on a swooned body, its perfectly white belly cast in shadow.
Jean Louis Schefer, The Deluge, The Plague

All they live by has been handled by others.
Giuseppe di Lampedusa, The Leopard

al mirall mogut
'a mirror that moves' in Catalan

IN RIVERS north of the future
I cast the net that you
haltingly weight
with stonewrit
shadows.
Paul Celan, Oct. 1963

My creatures are born of a long denial.
Pablo Neruda

I can tell them to go, and they go; but sometimes they come when I don't tell them to come.
?

I can't. I'm too nervous to eat pie.
Ray Carver notebook entry

There was the silent river and the silent man, a man of even classic face. And there was the last nightmare touch that his smile suddenly went wrong.
G.K. Chesterton, The Man Who Was Thursday

They mistrusted openings, gateways, roads by which unhappiness might arrive.
said of the people of Venasque

"Do you suppose there is something to be done?" I asked her, "Huddle and cling," said Mrs. Davis. "We can huddle and cling. It will pall, of course, everything palls, in time ..."
Donald Barthelme, At the End of the Mechanical Age

Where there is veneration,
Even a dog's tooth emits light.
Tibetan Proverb

It made one think of the prisons of the spirit men create for
themselves and for others - so overpowering,
So much a part of the way things appear to have to be
and then abruptly, with a little shift, so insubstantial.
V.S. Naipaul

There can be a poverty as well as a wealth in explicitness.
George Steiner, On Difficulty

Spending plenty of time on something can be the most sophisticated form of revenge.
Haruki Murakami, the Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

When I'm in the water anything is possible - it is gravity that lets me down.
CC

The world strikes me as a hurdy-gurdy overpressurized with trite rechurning.
Max Beckmann

... that duffed hybrid in the rough.
the description of Padraig Harrington's errant fairway drive during the 2006 USGA Golf Open by U.S. network commentator 'Dotty'

Drink a cicada soup, and you'll be singing all right.
Catanian idiom

The only things that appear are those which are first able to dissimulate themselves. Things already grasped in their aspect or peacefully resembling themselves never appear. They are apparent, of course, but only apparent: they will never be given to us as appearing.
Georges Didi-Huberman

It wasn't my kind of shallow.
Jello Biafra

Gathering the children from (or for?) the cache.
a message that flashed up briefly on Laylah A's laptop screen - 'Is it the Russians?'

I live only here, between your eyes and you,
But I live in your world. What do I do?
- Collect no interest - otherwise what I can;
Above all I am not that staring man.
Elizabeth Bishop, TO BE WRITTEN ON THE MIRROR IN WHITEWASH

It is sometimes necessary to remain faithful to an idea one has loved, even if one knows this idea to be dying.
Harun Farocki

God created everything from nothing, but the nothingness shows through.
Paul Valery

One must do as the animals do, who erase every footprint in front of their lair.
Montaigne

There commeth much evill in the eares, but more at the eyes.
Anthony Munday

Nothing is missing, not even, and especially, nothingness, the true solidifier of the scene.
Julio Cortazar

Hell is the place of those who have denied;
They find there what they planted and what dug,
A Lake of Spaces, and a Wood of Nothing,
And wander there and drift, and never cease
Wailing for substance.
W.B. Yeats, The Hour-Glass

All lightly shimmering in the heat, these lifeforms, like wonders much reduced. Rough likenesses thrown up at hearsay after the things themselves had faded in men's minds.
Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian

There's no better time to think big thoughts than under the guise of doing something. Anonymous Wisconsonite ice-fisherman